Status Quo
by Zela
Summary: A short £rd Doctor ficlet. You could describe as angsty. I was in an odd mood. Or, to quote what I've put inside, : The Doctor searches and searches, and is never satisfied with what he finds ... Suitably vague.


A/N: Yes. I did a very, very bad thing. And yet somehow, I like it. Here is a Third Doc ficlet, introspective, a little dark. Angsty.As I said, surprisingly, I like it. Read into it what you will. Oh, and the title ... has nothing to do with the story.

Rating: PG

Summary: The Doctor searches and searches, and is never satisfied with what he finds ...

Author: zela

Archives: Pah, no-one ever archives. But hell, if you want to, go ahead. Although, you know, a heads up would be nice.

He still remembered the first day. Stumbling from the TARDIS, fog everywhere, still too weak to tell if it was in his mind or the atmosphere. Confusion. That was the feeling he remembered most. Not, as everyone had supposed, fear. Or anger. No, there had been time enough for that later, but first and foremost had been the confusion of a strange planet, the bewilderment of waking to find himself in a foreign bed, dressed in clothes and a body not his own. And striking through all of that like a blade, clear and pure as a new thought, the thin crack of blood shining from a rapidly healing scratch on his arm. The colour had seemed so vibrant that it entranced him for minutes, and he'd sat there like a dummy on the edge of his bed, lost in it's intensity. And when the next day the doctor he would come to know as Liz Shaw accidentally sliced his arm whilst trying to take a blood sample, he took it as a sign.

He was scientific about it. The blood was not to be wasted. Instead, he took the samples and compared them, endlessly, to the one of Liz's own that she had taken that second day for her own comparison. All through the night he would search, and search, desperate to find as many differences as possible, cursing the similarities. It helped him to ignore the growing scars on his arms.

The Brigadier walked in on him one day, and he was shocked at the way his hearts jerked, and how relieved he was that the man was from a generation that couldn't even begin to discuss such an - unconventional - matter. Instead he'd desperately smiled and accepted his explanation of a smashed beaker, even though the scalpel was still dark with wet. After all, the Brigadier had thought to himself uncomfortably, he was an alien, wasn't he? Who knew what kind of habits he considered normal?

Despite the obvious willingness of the Brigadier not to get involved, the Doctor found himself confining the activity to the late hours of the night, found himself becoming almost furtive as he conducted it, found himself ignoring the way the cuts were getting deeper and some part of himself was starting to feel dirty. And still he searched for the differences.

Liz left for Cambridge, and all of a sudden the Doctor found himself without anything to do during the day and too much to do at night. He thought of moving his apparatus back into the TARDIS, but he realised he couldn't carry out his analysis with her watching over him. She couldn't understand why he would willingly do something that she could only see as hurting himself. She didn't see that he needed to see inside himself, needed to find everything that made him different, that made the humans have faith in him because he _wasn't_ them. That made him worthy to fly her. He wanted to be different. He wanted to fly again.

And one day Jo Grant turned up out of nowhere, and suddenly there was no time to continue his search, no time for anything at all. He still looked, of course, when he could grab a moment alone, when he could slice, swab, smear, and somehow his ritual continued, but the cuts became shallower, his body started to heal as only a Time Lord's could. And he began to look forward to the flurried visits in the middle of the night, the destruction of experiments that provided even more blessed distraction in the fixing of. The TARDIS began to murmur to him again. He still wondered why there were so many similarities, but more and more his quest to find the variants became something he could share. The gasp at the size of the TARDIS, the wicked grin as some alien technology went awry, the relief as he saved the day again; all the differences he could boast of were there, and she was the greatest listener.

And then one day, he could fly again.

From there on in, the differences multiplied daily, and he revelled in them, delighting in sharing each one, more and more of them supporting him on the planet he now had the choice to stay on.

And then one day, she left. It had gotten to her, in ways he couldn't see. And his differences had lost her.

That night he moved his _apparatus_, his sad little human microscope and scalpel, back outside the TARDIS. And as the blood flowed down his arm, he searched desperately, looking for the similarities.

End


End file.
